Jak propojit Linux s FPGA?

FPGA, Linux, driver, interconnection, throughput, platform

Today's FPGA chips provide even more capacity and options. There is a growing amount of configurable logic on the chip and it is possible to find a relatively powerful processor cores there. This creates the possibility to design complex systems-on-chip (SoC - System on Chip). Problems of the SoC system is relatively long development time. Today's development tools are trying to shorten the development time of synthesis algorithms described in C language for hardware architecture using high-level synthesis (HLS - High Level Synthesis). HLS allows to significantly reduce development time for hardware blocks, but it does not address the comunnication in between hardware and software. The article therefore focus on the possibility of linking FPGA logic to system running the Linux operating system. First, attention will be given to communication with Linux PCIe accelerator card. We describe the principles of providing high throughput and flexibility. Then we focus on FPGA Xilinx Zynq and Altera Cyclone V SoC, where we focus on putting Linux on ARM cores and consequently on the actual communication between Linux and FPGA logic. In both cases, we identify problems that may be encountered and how they should be addressed.